Friday, 16 October 2015

October is here once
again, and there is a chill both in the air and down the collectives
spines of anyone interested in darker subcultures. No other time of
year is so evocative of the spooky, the ghoulish and the occult than
October, as the shortening of the day and the ageing of the year lead
towards the fire rituals of November and the eventual winter
solstice; not only is it the time of year for grey skies, billowing
winds, falling leaves and thunderstorms but also the time of year
where pre-Halloween frenzy sits in. The shops are now pleasingly full
of bats, fangs, skulls, skeletons, ghosts, fake blood, chains,
cauldrons, pumpkins and zombies. For the goths it's probably no
surprise that this is the time of year where we do our domestic
shopping.

Of course Halloween
itself, based on pagan celebrations, acts as ghoulish hub for the
month. But is this the time of the year when we begin to feel a
stronger affinity with the essence of older, arcane myths and of
forgotten ritual, especially in the north? It is often said that
autumn has a poetry to it, but what is it that brings a turn to the
eerie in our collective psyche? It can't simply be the fact that it
gets darker in October – after all things get progressively darker
from the summer and darker still later in the year. So what is it in
the air when October arrives?

In Susanna Clarke's
'Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell' she creates an England based on a
brilliantly simple premise – that the primal folk myths of northern
England were based on a kind of magical reality. This is an
intriguing launchpad to a bigger question: what kind of relationship
exists between the contemporary gothic culture and the dark folk
myths and arcane beliefs that surround it?

For example – if we
may take my manor, Leeds. It has long been the home for gothic music
and culture, especially during the drabulous '80s when the city
centre streets were grey-black and gentrification was but a distant
dream. But just 10 miles outside of the city centre are expanses of
countryside with their own tales, superstitions, beliefs; and even
further north there are the Yorkshire Moors, where barghests, ghouls
and hobgoblins roam the night. Indeed, Ingrid Barton's 'North
Yorkshire Folk Tales', and the Wray/Marshall/Firth compendiums 'The
Haunted Coast' and 'The Witches of North Yorkshire' are full of
examples of such myths. So to what extent is urban, cultural gothic
merely a reflection of a more regional darkness based in the
countryside that surround the cities?

So this Halloween,
venture forth – go to haunted houses, investigate your local myths
and places of dark interest and dig under the urban veneer to find
the primal, beating heart of October. Westwood & Simpson's 'The
Lore of the Land' is a good place to start to find where those darker
echoes can be found near where you are, whether that is in Norwich,
Edinburgh, London or Blackpool. Bring a flask and a notebook too. And
then maybe when you're decking your home out in appropriately
seasonal decoration you may get that echo of recognition for the
pagan – and after all, that is where Halloween began.